Book review: Care of Wooden floors

‘WE MAKE our rooms, and then our rooms make us.” So Oskar – composer, aesthete, neat freak – informs the nameless narrator, his bumbling English friend, in Will Wiles’ debut novel. He has charged said friend with looking after his pristine flat in a faceless Eastern-European city while he gets divorced in LA.

Oskar’s home is so clean, so ordered, so heavy with good taste that it proves almost uninhabitable for its temporary minder, a failed writer who churns out copy for council pamphlets.

By day two of his stay a drop of red wine has tarnished the owner’s beloved wooden floors and attempts to remove it have left behind a pale smudge in the woodwork, so imperceptible that its creator believes it might just be a trick of the light, “a flash shadow after a photograph has been taken.”

However, we know enough of Oskar – through the detailed instructional notes he leaves dotted around the flat for his friend – to understand that the blemish is a serious matter, and it haunts its creator to the extent that it begins to tinker with his sanity. After a boozy night out, he wakes to find a second, much larger stain on the kitchen floor and the corpse of one of Oskar’s two cats crushed beneath the piano lid. The narrator’s attempts to cover his tracks begin to border on the criminal, while remaining comical.

An architecture and design critic, Wiles has a strong visual sensibility. His descriptions are rich and vivid – the smashed windows of an abandoned building are “like moves in a game of dereliction” – and his characters are strongly affected by the aesthetics of their surroundings.

A brilliant and wholly unexpected twist comes in the form of Oskar’s reaction to the destruction his friend has wrought in his flat. It’s dark and funny in equal measures, much like the rest of the novel, a debut as crisp, slick and polished as a well-cared-for wooden floor. «

Will Wiles

HarperPress, £12.99